There’s a new way to teach mathematics – again. Like most education reforms, it isn’t really new, just repackaged. It’s coming to classrooms via “mathematics educator” Phil Daro, the director of the working group that wrote the Common Core’s math standards. The last time it was new was during the Clinton administration, when the New Standards Project led the education reform parade.

Mr. Daro, formerly the director of the New Standards Project, is billed as a “math authority” and “math expert.” Like most education experts, his résumé is long on consulting, directing, and advising, and short on actual teaching. After all, you wouldn’t want any real, recent teaching experience to cloud your expert judgment.

Mr. Daro draws a distinction between American math instruction, which he calls “answer-getting,” and “answer giving,” the method he ascribes to Japanese teachers. He complains that American teachers are trying to show students how “to get the answer” to a problem. Instead, they should focus students on “the mathematics they’re supposed to learn from working on the problem.”

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Reality check: Stop texting your girlfriend, somebody lend him a pencil, that’s called a fraction, and wait till I explain this before you get a drink.

Like many reformers, Mr. Daro sets up a rhetorical straw man, a false image of American public education, which he then knocks down with an allegedly bright idea. Most math teachers I know, including most who taught me math, already do both – get the right answer by teaching the math involved. Yes, some teachers are better than others, but very few conveyed to me the allegedly “American” attitude, “Here’s the gimmick, kid. I don’t care if you understand the math.”

Mr. Daro makes another mistake common among reformers. Many even conscientious American students, and I’m guessing many even in Japan, only care about getting the right answer. They’re not growing up to be mathematicians, any more than most students will flower into poets the way many English teachers like to imagine.

For many math students “what matters most” isn’t the “problem-solving process.” Solving problems doesn’t especially stimulate their “competitive instinct and pride.” They just want to master the skill and move on. For most of us, there’s nothing wrong with that. We’d be doing fine if more students could simply get the right answer and write a cogent paragraph.

To “de-emphasize answer-getting,” Mr. Daro’s disciples urge giving students the answer before they solve the problem. This brings us to another common reform error – assuming something is new when it isn’t. In fact, this particular innovation is so not new that most of my 1960s math texts provided answers to the odd-numbered problems in the back of the book so students could rework problems they got wrong.

In the field of language arts, a new app is being credited with the greatest “impact on comprehension since the initial invention of the book itself.” The app, christened Booktrack, grew out of its creator’s daily commute, during which he’d read and listen to music. One day he decided to deliver his fellow straphangers from the curse of music that’s “disconnected from what they’re reading,” like “a sad song with an upbeat story.”

The resulting Booktracks combine e-books with “film style soundtracks,” including occasional sound effects. When the Lost Boys fight the pirates in Peter Pan, Booktrack adds “the clash of swords.” Sherlock Holmes stories feature “crackling fireplaces and ticking clocks.” Even the Bible has a Booktrack.

Of course, composers have been writing music based on books for centuries. Handel did a nice job setting the Bible to music when George II was king. And if you’re looking for tunes for some secular classics, check out Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Wagner’s Ring, and Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov’s soundtrack for The Arabian Nights.

It takes a world class dose of hubris to claim you’ve invented the biggest thing in reading since Gutenberg’s printing press. Booktrack further claims it’s “transforming reading the way sound transformed silent film.” Yes, Charlton Heston’s 1959 Ben Hur added a little to the 1925 version. But turning stories into motion pictures, whether silent or talking, is a far bigger deal than dubbing a ticking clock and music that already exists onto a story that also already exists.

As much as Booktrack falls far short of its technological hype, it’s even more grossly inflated as an instructional tool. Despite entrepreneurial claims that listening to a Booktrack produces “an instant shift in reading comprehension,” there’s “little evidence showing that music can improve reading comprehension.” As one Stanford psychology professor warned, “administrators should be very careful” before putting their trust, and their money, in products like Booktrack.

Don’t bet against Booktrack, though. First, as ridiculous as it is, it’s technology, and even in tight budget times, technology is an easy sell. Tech interests falsely have us convinced that any vote against technology is a vote to leave American children behind in the twenty-first century.

Second, Booktrack offers an easy answer to “Why can’t Johnny read,” a remedy that doesn’t require Johnny to do anything more than pop in a few tunes.

And in American public education, simplistic, painless snake oil remedies are even more common and popular than false miracles that plug in.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.

About the Author

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.